Milk the Research Funds

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I don’t want to give you any ideas, but there’s probably some money in this idea. Not necessarily good money either. It’s more like the stinky, dirty government grants for scientific inquiries that don’t play a tune in a logical mind. You know what I’m talking about, we hear about them all of the time, like when we heard about the non-scientist who won a government grant so he could test to find out if subway stair rails carry germs. Did he actually do the research, or did he just cotton swab the bottom of his shoe and submit the sample he found there? Or how about the other non-scientist who supposedly did a study on whether homelessness was healthy or not? (Turns out it’s not as healthy as we all thought. ) Or what about the study that discovered laughing can make a person with an illness feel better? A lot of these, you hear them, and you immediately realize that the joke IS the punch line.

Seriously though, I don’t know if any of these studies were conducted using government funds (which is another way of saying “money out of YOUR pocket”). When you hear about studies like these, do you even care where the money came from to make it happen? The money was wasted, no matter where it came from.

Sarcasm aside, this idea of mine, or rather, this question of mine, is not nearly as silly as some of the examples above. At least not to me.

What I really want to know is: why does milk taste better out of a glass than out of, say, a plastic cup?

And that brings to mind another question: can you see how I got here? I was wondering why milk tastes better out of a glass, and then I thought about how I would figure that out, and I imagined pouring milk into several different types of materials like plastic, or wood, or metal. I thought about measuring the amount of material that leaks in to the milk from the container, or the amount of good tasting probiotics versus bad tasting ones. I considered how to do any of that on my milk-drinking budget, and I realized I needed the government to intervene, to supply the resource of cash. I needed to do some serious research, and I would need…

“Nah!” I told myself. “Just enjoy the moo, and if you’re feeling festive, add chocolate.”

No Food is Limited to a Day

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It’s worth admitting that I was sucked in to the whole Taco Tuesday idea. It seemed like tacos were already on my menu, so why not set aside one day a week for the fabulous food.

Then I missed a Tuesday.

It wasn’t a horrific, life-altering experience or anything (though I’m sure some would love to hear that), but it was definitely an eye-opener. There was that hole in my belly, waiting for tacos to fill it, and what did it get? A ham sandwich. Nothing wrong with ham, either. It just wasn’t the taco that I had built my schedule around for several weeks running.

A little twist in the habits and we feel all out of place, don’t we?

Like eating a taco with your left hand, when you usually eat one with your right. If you did that, you’d have to tilt your head the opposite direction, lean over the plate a different way, and even pour the hot sauce with your other hand. It’s as awkward thinking about it as it is doing it.

It’s all so goofy, isn’t it? Despite that, I figured it was my brain that was having the most trouble.

Why did my habit make me feel so out of sync with the world? Because I let it.

I had to ask myself if tacos were only lawfully consumed on Tuesday. And then I laughed at myself. Of course tacos are one of those any-day, any-time meals. Do they have to be confined to dinner on Tuesday? Even though the sing-song nature of the alliterative phrase Taco Tuesday is fun to say, the answer is definitely no.

Sure there are those other days that are fun to say, and that limit our food choices as little, such as: Finger-Food Friday, Seafood Saturday, and Moon Pie Monday. Sure there are benefits to scheduling your food for certain days, for example, it sure makes shopping easier. And sure there is that Lego movie, with its funny happenings on Tuesday. However, there’s no logical reason behind force-feeding a day of the week. If Wednesday wants a taco, let it have a taco. And if the hole in your belly wants one at four in the morning—well—you better hope you can hunt down that taco truck.

Daft

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I swear some people are blissfully unaware of their surroundings. I am not making this up when I tell you that some unnamed person sent me TWO emails in the same amount of days to tell me that they couldn’t leave me a voicemail. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t going to sing to me.

I wonder though, if this is one of those anxiety things. Does the person have an anxiety that limits their communication options to voicemail only? I guess that’s possible. Or possibly someone a long time ago told them that voicemail was the proper method of communicating with others. If someone filled their head with that sort of odd social programming, that will make future communications very interesting for me, won’t it? Will they only accept voicemails from me as well? Time will tell.

It’s kind of like that time I was at the beach, and on this particular beach they have lockers near the guard station, so I saw a person go up, put coins in to pay for a locker, throw their phone and other valuables in there, along with the key to the locker. Then only a few seconds passed and they were trying to get in the locker. It wasn’t long before this person got the guards in on their self-induced problem—and they started blaming the guards, as if it was their fault. The locker wasn’t opening fast enough for the person who threw the key inside, and they were getting irate.

This sort of attitude in people makes me think of a four letter word:

DAFT.

You have to make yourself daft to not see the obvious that’s right in front of you. You have a communication option and use it to complain about a non-working form of communication; or you lock up the part of a system that gave you access to the secure area; that’s daft, isn’t it?

Oh well, life goes on. I’ll end up instructing this unnamed person on how to use the methods available, and then he’ll end up instructing me on something else later. It all goes around—like a daft virus.

Literary Dysfunction

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One of the peeves I have with the literary world is that they don’t have a lot of agreement between publishers. When you submit a work to one publisher after another it would be nice if they all agreed upon one font. But they have different font preferences between them, and even sometimes within the same company! You’ll have an editor who prefers one font, and a proofreader who prefers another, and then the printing people like a different font! Can’t they all just get together and decide on one thing? The cinematic world has a standard font: it’s Courier. (There is a push for Courier New, but Courier is still the main standard. And Courier New isn’t all that different from Courier.) If the movie making crowd can all agree on one font, I’m sure the literary world can do it.

It’s time, publishers big and small, so get it together!